An ultrasound imaging system includes a transducer array with a one-dimensional (1-D) or a two-dimensional (2-D) array of transducing elements. A 2-D transducer array has been employed for 3-D real-time scanning of a volume by arranging the transducer elements in a rectangular grid and steering the beam in the lateral and elevation directions to acquire data of the volume. Where the rectangular grid has an N×N geometry, the total number of elements is N2. To individually control each of the elements, a direct connection is made to each element.
Channel count can be reduced, while maintaining aperture size, through a sparse array, in which only a subset of the elements is active at the same time. However, these arrays have a reduced signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and introduce higher side lobes and/or grating lobes on severe sparseness. This results in degradation of image contrast and constrains the diagnostic value of the exam. Another approach includes operating the N×N array as an RCA array. For this, the elements are addressed group-wise by row and column index, and each row and column of elements acts as one large element. A fully addressed RCA N×N array would require only 2N channels.
However, addressing individual elements or rows and columns of elements leads to practical challenges in producing the interconnections, sampling, and real-time processing of a large volume of data, and a large number of wires results in a large cable from the transducer to the scanner. Hence, there is an unresolved need for an approach that further reduces the number of channels between the probe and the console for real-time 3-D imaging, e.g., for probes that transmit data to a console using wired and/or wireless technologies.